New Year. New You!

Staying on track with your goals in 2014

New Year's Resolutions 
Most people start a new year's resolution by saying 'I am going to stop this' or 'I'm going to start that' but they don't plan how they're going to do it so when the going gets tough they fall off the wagon very easily. It doesn't have to be that way. With a proper plan you can set realistic tangible goals and create a compelling action plan that will give you a road map to achieving your goals. Wanting something isn't enough. You have to have a plan to get there. Below are a few pointers to consider when setting goals.

Fail to plan, plan to fail. Don't let this be you this year!


Setting Specific goals
To ensure success in goal setting you must begin by being clear on exactly what it is you want. If it's weight you want to lose how much weight? By when? Do you want to lose weight in pounds or kilos or drop a dress size? The more specific your goal, the easier it is to achieve it and the easier it is to measure achievement. 

Measurement
Another important factor in goal setting is measurement. How will you know you have achieved your goal? How will you measure it? Can you measure it quantitatively (I want to lose X amount of pounds) or qualitatively (I want to feel healthy)? Qualitative measurement isn't as definite as quantitative so you may have to define exactly what you mean by feel healthy.

Decide how you will measure your progress so that you know when you have reached your destination.

Timed
Your goal should be timed. You should give yourself and deadline and stick to it. The reason it is important to have a specific date and time for completion is so that you're not forever moving your finish line. By not giving yourself a time to finish you may take a year for what could be done in a month. When there's no real urgency you will take longer than necessary at best or at worst, not complete the task at all. Without a date your goal is just a dream. Many people have dreams but few have GOALS. Dreams often remain just that - dreams. But goals are specific, planned and timed.

Remember it this way: A goal is a dream with a date!

These are just a few pointers. There is so much more involved in goal setting like how you phrase it, writing your goal down, reviewing and updating regularly, breaking it down… But the essential thing is to have a goal in the first place! So give yourself some time, grab a pen and some paper and get planning!

Have a wonderfully productive New Year achieving your goals!

Sally x

(For more on goal setting book a free 30 minute coaching session and see whether clear goal setting could help you to achieve your health and fitness goals quicker and more efficiently. Or visit us at our next Lifestyle Seminar this month (see below for details).

SHL Lifestyle Seminar - Saturday 18th January 2014

Want to learn how to be fit and healthy and be motivated to do it? At SHL Lifestyle Seminars we teach more that just regular weight loss tips but how you can actually stop being addicted to foods, eat the foods that promote healthy weight and hormonal balance and give you a better outlook on life; and how to exercise easily, cheaply and according to the goals and lifestyle you have.

A healthy lunch is included in the four hour workshop-style session and you will be shown live demos on exercises and equipment used.

Plus lots of fun and games as you get to know people just like you.

SHL Lifestyle Seminar

18th January 2014, 10am-2pm

Third Door

16 Point Pleasant

London SW18 1GG

10 Early Bird tickets available £45 each (£60 thereafter).

For more info see Eventbrite booking page or visit website www.sallyhumphries.com or email info@sallyhumphries.com 

Hope to see you there!

How to survive the Festive Season (and still have fun!)

Tis' the season to be jolly la la la la la, la la, la la!

What an amazing time it is. The season of mulled wine and mince pies, office parties and catching up with friends and family. It's a great time to enjoy treats and everywhere you go there seems to be something on offer that you might normally turn down. So how do you keep a check on what you're eating when it's all around you?  We've put some tips together on how you can have a good time over Christmas without living to regret it in the new year. 

Tip #1

Don't eat it just because it's there

Sometimes we eat just because food is there. Don't feel obliged to reach your hand into the crisps bowl just because it's shoved in front of you. Be selective on what you eat. Eat for enjoyment and savour the flavour rather than eating mindlessly without any thought. Also, don't feel obliged to eat just because you are at someone's house and they offer you everything they have. Chances are that you will be offered plenty of treats. Take the ones you love and can't resist but leave the ones that you can live without. At home, try not to have too many nibbles out. Before you know it you'll be nibbling away at whatever is on the coffee table. Remember, you don't have to eat everything. Enjoy some treats without going overboard.

Tip #2

Make healthier choices

It's easy to have a delicious meal that is a little more healthy than your usual meal by making small changes that don't compromise on the taste. If you're making your own Christmas dinner consider the following:

• Switching from using white potatoes to orange flesh sweet potatoes, which are high in fibre and more nutritious and have a lower glycemic index. 
• Choose to cook with healthy fats like coconut oil or even butter rather than cheap vegetable oils. 
• Take the skin off the turkey. Fifty percent of the fat is in the skin. You will be reducing your saturated fat intake and your calorie intake by 50%! Well worth it.
• Choose a chestnut or fruit-based stuffing instead of pork meat and you could cut up to half the total calories and half the fat content.
• Remove fat from meat juices before making your gravy. Pour turkey (meat) juices into a jug and wait for the fat to rise to the surface. Spoon off or pour the fat off before making the gravy. 
• Use skimmed milk to make bread sauce, reducing your calories by more than 50%! Add a clove of garlic to the milk to add flavour.
• Drizzle olive oil on your vegetables rather than smother them with butter. Olive oil has a delicious taste and is just as good as butter at glazing your veg and stopping it from being dry. Olive oil is also very good for you eaten raw as it's high in monounsaturated and a better choice that saturated fats. You could even add some herbs and a little lemon zest.
• Swap brandy butter to low fat custard. 
• Have a smaller portion of Christmas pudding as it's high in sugar.
• Eat wheat free mince pies as the wheat in the pastry turns to sugar in the body making it a perfect scenario for weight gain and bloating.
• Eat stewed fruit with low fat cream or yoghurt.
• Choose chocolate over stodgy puddings (may be high in sugar and fat but at least there's no wheat so no bloating!)

Tip #3

Reduce alcohol intake 

Believe it or not your alcoholic drink is packed with calories. With a large glass of wine being almost equivalent to a Cornetto ice cream or three cans of beer equivalent to a fast food sandwich. If you can't live without a drink you may want to balance this out by having less dessert or vice versa. Just think of alcohol as liquid cake so you can't have double portions!

More tips include:

• Dilute your favourite drink with water to make it last longer.
• Choose low alcohol lager.
• Choose wine with 11% or less alcohol (they do exist!)
• Avoid sugary cocktails. They have all the calories of the alcohol as well as high sugar content from the fruit juice.
• Try non-alcoholic drinks. They are not as bad as they seem and great if you're driving home too.
• Don't drink! Now there's a thought. You can make the choice to abstain from drinking. This will make you a good candidate for driving people home and allow you the joy of a headache free Christmas morning! Two good deeds in one!

Tip #4

Stay active

It's so easy once you've done all the preparations to sit down and veg out over Christmas. While you may well deserve a good rest, you will do yourself a favour by keeping yourself active. Doing some light exercise will give you more energy and will keep you from slumping and feeling lazy. It will also help to burn extra calories and keep your digestive system healthy. If you suffer from a bad back it is also better to stay moving as your back needs nutrient rich blood flowing to it which it's deprived from when you're sitting down for too long. 

If you've been exercising, you will also be in a better position in January when you want to start a new fitness regime, both physically, as you'll have less body-weight to lose and also emotionally, as you won't feel so heavy and lethargic as you would if you've been a couch potato throughout the celebrations.

So choose to stay active by:

• Taking long walks after a meal
• Trying to get to the gym at least twice a week
• Doing some home exercises
• Playing on the Wii with the family
• Playing with your children and grandchildren
• Offering to take the dog for a walk!

Tip #5

Start your fitness regime early

There's no need to wait until January to start exercising and keeping healthy. You can have a head start by starting in December. In fact for many people December can be busy in the way of preparations but less busy work-wise. So incorporate some exercise into your daily routine like before you start your Christmas shopping or after a long day at the shops. You'll be glad you did!

Tip #6

Relaxxxx!

Finally, whatever you decide to do over Christmas, decide to have fun and enjoy it. The festive season is meant to be a time to celebrate and get together with friends and loved ones but too often it is filled with stress. Stress in not good for the body or the mind! Choose to give yourself some time to relax over Christmas. Try not to stress about what's been done or not done. Use this time to recoup and regenerate and dream about goals for the New Year!

Have a Fab, Fun and Fit Christmas!!! 

Sally x 

For more info on keeping yourself healthy get in touch for a free one to one consultation. 

Are vegetable and seed oils good for you?

At our recent Lifestyle Seminar we spoke about a number of ‘unobvious’ things that make our diet unhealthy. By unobvious I mean things that people wouldn’t necessarily deem as unhealthy.

It is interesting that there are many people that think that seed oils, like sunflower oil for example, are good for you. However, it is not surprising because we are constantly bombarded with health claims of these oils because of their low saturated fat content and high in polyunsaturated fat content. Of course most people don’t question whether this is true or not. You certainly wouldn’t look at a sunflower and think of it as unhealthy or question how healthy vegetables are.

So, how exactly are seed oils, like sunflower and vegetable oils made?

Firstly the main thing to remember is that to obtain oil from any such seed it has to be highly processed using industrial techniques in large factories because there is no simple or natural way to extract these oils from seeds. Unlike olive oil which is cold pressed to retrieve its oil. In fact seed oils are a fairly new addition to our diet that only appeared in the early 1900’s after the invention of industrial processing techniques (factories).

Ok, so a bit of processing won’t hurt you say. Really? Well let me tell you what kind if processing we’re talking about. 

We’re talking about heating the seeds at unnaturally high temperatures so that they oxidise (go rancid) then, process with a petroleum solvent to extract the oils, a chemical called hexane, (they get washed in this chemical for 70 minutes. This chemical is also used in the formulation of glues for shoes, leather and roofing!). Then acid is added to remove any nasty wax solids that were formed during initial processing. The oil is then bleached to improve the colour and finally the oil is deodorised to get rid of the terrible smell caused by the oxidation process (the rancidity). To see how seed oil (Canola) is made see figure 1 below and watch this video. (However don’t be fooled by the ‘health’ claim at the beginning! Canola oil is made from a hybrid seed made from rapeseed. There is no such thing as a canola seed!).

Fig. 1 How Canola Oil is processed

Now we could stop there and that should hopefully be enough to make you think twice before eating this stuff. But there’s more.

Polyunsaturated Fats - PUFA's

Vegetable oil, (wrongly called vegetable oil because it doesn’t come from vegetables but from seeds), is highly unstable. This means that when it’s exposed to air, light or heat it starts to oxidise or go rancid. The seeds themselves have naturally built in antioxidants but these antioxidants are destroyed during the processing. So it is very likely that even before you buy the oil and bring it home form the store, it has already started to go rancid just by sitting on the shelves, especially since it is packaged in clear plastic bottles. To further the problem, when the oil is heated it continues to oxidise so that any antioxidants that were spared during the first process have definitely been destroyed by now. When we ingest the oil it continues to oxidise in our bodies. The instability causes free radicals to begin to destroy the cell membranes and cause cell mutations. This results in inflammation and has been linked with many diseases such as cancer, heart disease and endometriosis.

The main cause of the instability in seed oils is PUFA’s, Poly Unsaturated Fatty Acids, also know as Omega-6 fatty acids.

You may have heard about these as being very good for you. The truth is they are good for you but in small proportions. The body needs these in equal amounts to Omega-3 fatty acids (ratio of 1:1) which are also essential for good health. However, in today’s Western diet we are having a ratio of about 16:1. Way too many of these Omega-6 fatty acids have entered our diet and thrown things out of balance.

Hydrogenation

To add to this very interesting process, when making vegetable spreads, the oils further undergo a process called hydrogenation, where a hydrogen atom is added to change the chemical structure of the compound so that it can be solid in room temperature. If you’re not sure whether your spread had undergone this process ask yourself the question, would this substance normally be liquid or solid in room temperature? You’ll find that nothing is solid in room temperature except for pure butter, which is high in saturated fats that make it solid. You can safely say that any vegetable spread that you have sitting in your fridge even olive oil spread has been through this process.

Cold Pressed Seed Oils

There is an argument for cold pressed seed oils versus manufactured oils. The argument is that when cold pressed they do not go through the same highly chemical process that they do when manufactured. This means that they have not been exposed to high heat making them unstable. I am still researching this as it is a valid argument and so far I have not found any proponents to this apart from those promoting these products. A more objective view is needed but for me, thinking about this commonsensically, there is still the issue of the high polyunsaturated fat content which is still a no-no as it causes oxidation, which leads to cell damage in the body. For that reason 'I'm out' as the dragons say but I will still be researching it for you and update you on what I find.

Here’s a list of the types of oils that go through this type of processing:

•    Rapeseed Oil (Canola Oil in US)

•    Corn Oil

•    Soybean Oil

•    Vegetable Oil

•    Peanut Oil (Peanuts are not nuts they’re seeds)

•    Sunflower Oil

•    Safflower Oil

•    Cottonseed Oil

•    Grapeseed Oil

•    Margarine

•    Shortening

•    I Can’t Believe Its Not Butter

•    Any fake butter or vegetable oils products

These oils can also be found in foods such as:

•    Salad Dressings

•    Store Bought Condiments

•    Mayonnaise

•    Chips

•    Artificial Cheeses

•    Store bought nuts and snacks (usually coated with oil)

•    Cookies

•    Crackers

•    Snack Foods

•    Sauces

Practically anything sold in the middle aisles of the store!

Better choices:

• Olive oil – raw not heated
• Coconut oil – for cooking, spreading, baking
• Butter – naturally processed but very high in saturates. Be careful not to use it too much! Try using coconut oil instead
• Oily fish
• Nuts
• Avocados

Happy healthy eating!

P.S. The next Lifestyle Seminar will be taking place on Saturday 2nd November 2013. Please see website for details or sign up to our regular newsletter for updates.

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September is here! Are you ready?

September is here! Are you ready?

As daunting as it may sound, some may welcome the safe boundaries of getting back to a routine. It's nice to sleep in, to go on holiday, have evenings out and BBQ's - but even that relaxed way of life can become tiring after a while, even boring. We begin to long for the routine again. To get our life organised and things we've neglected back on track.

September is a great time to do that. The sun is still shining and we've not entered dark days yet although they are soon coming! 

As a coach I often hear of four main areas that people want to work on to get themselves back on track. They are:

Fitness
Finances
Work
Relationships - not necessarily in that order!

It seems that when each of these areas is ticking along nicely we are content. 

The problem however, is that we often focus on one area of our lives at a time to the detriment of the others. Some people are so bogged down with work for example that they have no time to invest in their relationships. Or they are focusing on their relationships that they are neglecting their fitness.

Coaching brings clarity. It's time spent thinking about what you want to achieve and how you want to achieve it. It's a time to focus your energies on your goals-but not just to think about them, to actually plan around them.

Nothing feels better than being ready for a season change. Let's go into winter with a clear plan for work, coping in the winter months, our fitness regime, even Christmas! Take a look a look at our coaching offers below. It's not too late to start.

This year waste no time. Plan your life and live it to the full!

We look forward to helping you to live your best life ever

SHL Team

September coaching offers

One-to-one coaching - 30 minute coaching session - Free

Power Packs
Back on track
Fit 'n' Fabulous
Back to Work and Lovin' it!
Change Your Thinking Change Your Life
Change Your Eating Change Your life
Get organised!

Some programmes consist of coaching and mentoring. Please call for your free session to find out more.

To book call 0208 133 1997 or 07894 033 310 or email info@sallyhumphrieslifestyle.com